Chronicles Magazine
American West

As a political phenomenon, “the Moggster,” as he is known, is quite Trumpian. He is wildly popular in a way that the experts cannot understand. As Trump was in 2015, he is dismissed as a ridiculous figure who can’t win.

Field of Blood is one of the best new novels I have read in many a year, a superbly written book by a Russian scholar and analyst who is also a careful artist, a stylist, and a poet in prose and in form who has accomplished what few essayists and...